The Leftist's Prayer: Give Me Freedom From My Demons -- But Not Yet!

Time only for a brief post. Busy day ahead.

In connection with our discussion of satan, I reread the chapter on the devil card in Meditations on the Tarot. Tomberg highlights two important characteristics, intoxication and counter-inspiration -- in fact, the intoxication of counter-inspiration. It is rare indeed to encounter a sober-minded leftist. But nor is it common to encounter an uninspired one! Have you seen Keith Olbermann's intoxicated rants?

In-spiration has to do with the reception of spirit. But as we all know, spirit cuts two ways. There are benign and helpful spirits, and malevolent and destructive ones. So, being "inspired" is nether here nor there. Rather, we must always consider the source.

He also points out that there are two modes of evil, a seducing principle and a hypnotizing principle. These two are pervasive in academia, but something must occur prior to the seduction and hypnosis in order for the content to take root, so to speak; one must be susceptible to the assault. There must be a wound, an opening, a breach in one's defenses, as discussed in the previous post.

I believe this is rooted in a type of parenting that places undue pressure on the child, breaking his will and forcing him to conform. As a result, the child will grow up being unable to resist authority -- he will become "hypnotized" in its presence. It is very much analogous to girls who have been sexually abused, and who, as adults, are vulnerable to getting involved with abusive men. Something in them is broken, which the "hypnotizer" and "seducer" easily picks up.

Tomberg also touches on the enslavement that results from creating projected demons. He says that the card is not so much about Satan as such, but about "the generation of demons and of the power that they have over those who generate them." "[B]eings can forfeit their freedom and become slaves of a monstrous entity which makes them degenerate by rendering them similar to it."

Contemporary leftism is all about creating the very demons that enslave oneself, AKA the victim culture. In order to be a self-styled victim, one must first create the projected super-structure of victimizers, e.g., "white privilege," "the patriarchy," "Islamophobia," etc.

These latter are needed by the victims, which is why you cannot rationally eliminate them from the leftist looniverse. Indeed, this is precisely why "structural racism" had to be invented, since there are so few (white) racists to be found. This is how, as one left wing academic put it, we can have racism with no racists!

So, a left-wing victim is a slave of his projected demons. For some reason I surfed into a feminist website the other day, and the bitterness of its victimhood was particularly over the top. Let's see if I can find it. Here it is. I clicked on the link to "Feminism 101," expecting a paragraph or two, but it's a book-length rant. It just goes on and on and on, into every miserable corner of her life. This person has never even wondered if the misery might be coming from within! She is a human toothache who locates the source of pain outside her own big mouth.

Radical feminists are simply slaves of their own creation. And not for one second do such slaves want to venture outside their demonic enslavement! Last night I was reading a book by Dr. Dalrymple, who writes of how difficult it is to get patients to say goodbye to their symptoms, which, after all, are there for a reason.

"Symptoms are like bad husbands and wives: people will go to any length to be rid of them but, once gone, they miss them terribly. The result is that the symptoms return in new and worse forms..." Which is why racism returns as "structural racism" and "misogyny" metastasizes into to the chaotic mess linked above.

Speaking of which, Tomberg writes that "The world of evil is a chaotic world," more like a "luxuriant jungle" than an ordered space, "where you can certainly, if necessary, distinguish hundreds of particular plants, but where you can never attain clear view of the totality."

So true. It is like a pre-scientific mindset in which there are only particulars but no organizing principles. Which is why it is not accurate to point out the ubiquitous "hypocrisy" of the left, since you can't really be a hypocrite if you have no principles to begin with. It reminds me of Pope Benedict's gag about "the tyranny of relativism" -- or of relativism absurdly elevated to absoluteness.

But "Evil cannot be absolute" for "it always depends upon some good which it misuses or perverts; the quality of Absoluteness can belong to good alone. To say 'good' is therefore to say 'absolute'" (Schuon).